Policing Roethlisberger

How do you deal with a player like Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback, who has had two sets of sexual assault allegations raised against him in the last year? (He has denied both; Close Read has been followingthe story.) Peter King, in a column at SI.com, writes that Roethlisberger should be suspended by N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell for

at least four games at the start of the season, for violating the league’s personal conduct policy…. Goodell’s punishment can’t just be four, six or eight games. It has to include some mandatory counseling.

In a way, the talk of a punishment is striking. Roethlisberger found out last week that he wouldn’t face criminal charges in one case, an alleged rape in Georgia; the other, a civil suit in Nevada, is still pending. But, really, it’s almost more surprising that the Steelers seem committed to keeping him. King writes,

I’m not sure the Steelers giving Roethlisberger another chance is going to mollify Steeler fans. I think the anger of the fans is not going to be soothed very soon, and rightfully so….

I know Steeler fans well. I married a Pittsburgh girl. The tenor of the fans I’ve spoken with goes something like this: I’ll always love the Steelers, but I’ll never cheer for that bum Roethlisberger again.

Why do fans think he’s a bum, even though he isn’t being charged? The story from Georgia is just ugly. The apparent reasons that Roethlisberger was able to avoid charges are disquieting—and, judging from the files that have been released so far, are inseparable from the behavior of some supposed officers of the law. An off-duty Pennsylvania trooper and policeman were acting as Roethlisberger’s bodyguards, if that’s how you want to describe their role. The alleged victim’s friends said that they “dragged” the woman, a twenty-year-old college student who had been drinking, off to Roethlisberger and then kept them from getting to her. When the women finally got her out of there, they sought out Jerry Blash, a Milledgeville, Georgia, police officer; they say he tried to talk them out of making a report. Blash admitted to investigators that he went straight to Roethlisberger’s party—which included the off-duty officers—and told them about the accusations in crude and dismissive terms, calling the woman “this bitch.” That wasn’t just mean; it had a practical effect. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when Fredric Bright, the D.A., called Roethlisberger’s lawyer, the lawyer put him

on notice that he knew of Mr. Blash’s derogatory words about the accuser and that the sergeant had “stated that he did not believe her story.”

Mr. Bright was “very concerned,” Agent Davis reported.

The concern was that the policeman’s remarks could be used as evidence not of his lack of professionalism, but of the young woman’s lack of credibility—incredibly enough. Blash, in interviews with investigators, one of them more than a week after the alleged assault, also said that when he’d asked the woman if she’d been raped she had said “No, I did not know what was going on,” and wasn’t even sure if she’d had sex with Roethlisberger. But, as the Post-Gazette noted,

Those interviews are the only places where Mr. Blash’s description of that conversation—and the woman’s denial of being raped—is memorialized, according to Agent Davis.

“He did not put that in his original report, only in his interview. His original report was very brief,” Agent Davis said.

All other accounts—the accuser’s two written statements and her friends’ interviews with investigators—consistently state that the woman claimed Mr. Roethlisberger forced sex on her.

Who is the reliable one? Blash resigned from the police force late last week. But by then the D.A. had already made his decision—aided by a letter from the woman’s lawyer saying that she didn’t want the prosecution to go forward. One issue for her and her family, apparently, was that they didn’t trust the police.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.